/Florida officials say the system will be used only by authorized investigators under tight supervision. They said it includes data that has always been available to investigators, but brings it together and enables police to access it with extraordinary speed./

/'The power of this technology -- to take seemingly isolated bits of data and tie them together to get a clear picture in seconds -- is vital to strengthening our domestic security,' said James 'Tim' Moore, who was commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement until (July)./

/A senior official overseeing the project acknowledged it could be intrusive and pledged to use it with restraint. 'It's scary. It could be abused. I mean, I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors,' said Phil Ramer, special agent in charge of statewide intelligence. 'Our biggest problem now is everybody who hears about it wants it.'
The Matrix project began soon after the Sept. 11 terror attacks./

/'We showed it to the other states, and the other states went nuts.' They came up with an idea of a search engine called 'Who' that would be at the core of the 'concept as a national intelligence project,' Ramer said.
He added that he's never seen so powerful a system in his many years in law enforcement. To replicate it 'we'd have to go to 10,000 systems. It would just take you forever.'/

/Asher also has donated services to the FBI, the Secret Service and other agencies./

/Former Secret Service head Brian Stafford recently went to work as a senior executive at Seisint./